Via The Oil Drum: Canada, we learn from the Globe and Mail that the UN’s top environment official blasted Canada during the IPCC conference in Bali.

The head of the UN’s climate change agency is a careful diplomat. So when he took the unusual step of firing a barb at Canada, it was a sign of how far the country’s reputation has sunk.

Yvo de Boer portrayed Canada as a climate hypocrite whose demands might be received poorly by other nations. Ottawa is demanding cuts in emissions by Third World countries after failing to meet its own commitments, he said.

“I personally find it interesting to hear Canada, just a little while ago, indicating it would not meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and now calling on developing countries to take binding reduction targets.”

EU participants agreed “to remove reference to the 25-40% emission targets by 2020,” which writes Kelley Greenman, was “the very basis of post-Kyoto action!” Why was Canada one of perpetrators of this environmental travesty?

While no Canadian Nobel laureate leveled an accusation against the government of his own country, we learn from the Toronto Star (also via the same TOD post) about voices of opposition to how Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative government is ‘hindering’ progress on efforts to mitigate anthropogenic emissions that result in disastrous climate change. In an interview, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said that Canada should be leading the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

McGuinty said privileged countries like Canada have a responsibility to deal with a climate change problem they helped create, but complained that the Conservatives are allowing greenhouse gas emissions to increase with their so-called intensity-based approach.

Surface mining is a principle means of harvesting oil shale. Surface mining generally leaves large devastated areas, called spoil banks, unless the land is reclaimed. Since surface mining removes overlying landscapes and places a high demand upon water resources, environmentalists see a significantly adverse effect on local ecosystems.

Why was Canada one of few countries to oppose development of a road map at Bali that set emission targets by 2020? A third story about Canada in The Oil Drum post might provide a possible explanation. We learn from The Independent about what they refer to in the article as “The biggest environmental crime in history”.

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move “Beyond Petroleum” by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its “green sheen” by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the “biggest global warming crime” in history.

The multinational oil and gas producer, which last year made a profit of £11bn, is facing a head-on confrontation with the green lobby in the pristine forests of North America after Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called “oil sands” that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world’s second-largest proved oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

Producing crude oil from the tar sands – a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta – an area the size of England and Wales combined – generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK’s entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists.

Two barrels of water are required to extract one barrel of oil; every day as much water is taken from the Athabasca river as would serve a city of a million people. Although the water is extensively recycled, it cannot be returned to the rivers, so it ends up in man-made “tailings ponds” (tailings is a catch-all term for the byproducts of mining), which are also visible from space. According to the US Department of the Interior, the dam holding back Syncrude’s pond is the largest, by volume of construction material, in the world. Four of the projects haven’t started production yet, so their tailings ponds haven’t begun, but theirs, too, will soon be full of sand and what Schindler calls “dead water” because, he says, they’re full of carcinogenic hydrocarbons and toxic trace metals such as mercury, cadmium and arsenic, all topped off, in Syncrude’s case, with an oil slick.

There are other partners-in-crime in addition to British Petroleum. As a form of protest (not to mention entertainment for the Internet), Impostors posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives delivered an outrageous keynote speech to 300 oilmen at GO-EXPO, Canada’s largest oil conference, held at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta, The Vivoleum Speech was to protest “a crime against humanity.”

Canada’s oil sands, along with “liquid coal,” are keystones of Bush’s Energy Security plan. Mining the oil sands is one of the dirtiest forms of oil production and has turned Canada into one of the world’s worst carbon emitters. The production of “liquid coal” has twice the carbon footprint as that of ordinary gasoline. Such technologies increase the likelihood of massive climate catastrophes that will condemn to death untold millions of people, mainly poor.

“If our idea of energy security is to increase the chances of climate calamity, we have a very funny sense of what security really is,” Bonanno said. “While ExxonMobil continues to post record profits, they use their money to persuade governments to do nothing about climate change. This is a crime against humanity.”

And, not just a company that has yet settled its accounts for the clean-up following the Exxon Valdez spill. Shell’s Albian Sands,a 90-minute commutes from Fort McMurray, is also part of the surface mining for bitumen that David Schindler, professor of ecology at the University of Alberta, believes has raised the temperature in the area by two degrees centigrade in the past 40 years.

The oil sands excavations are changing the surface of the planet. The black mines can now be seen from space. In 10 years, estimates Schindler, they are “going to look like one huge open pit” the size of Florida. “Mud, Sweat and Tears“

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